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Jacques-Louis David: The Roman Revolution

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784

I first was stunned by Jacques-Louis David's art in the great galleries of the Louvre, where his larger-than-life paintings both literally and figuratively dwarf the viewer by their charged economies of statement and color. Perhaps more than any famous painter of the past, David's art cannot be separated from his politics: neither can be viewed without understanding his deep thematic love for the stories of ancient Rome and what he believed they revealed about courage in the world of 18th century revolution. He not only painted the French Revolution, he served in it and (one may suspect) outgrew its excesses, establishing meanwhile a school of art which would influence Europe for the next fifty years.

Born in 1748 to a middle-class family in Paris, David lost his parents at an early age and was raised by relatives. He disliked schooling with a stubborn rebelliousness but loved drawing from his earliest youth. When he was 18 he began studying painting at the Academie Royale under a master of the then-prevalent Rococo style, J.M. Vien. David, to his chagrin, was passed over several times in competitions for the prize of the prestigious Prix de Rome, and later became a bitter critic of the conventional Academie curriculum. He lived long enough to see it suppressed during the Revolution he helped to inspire.

David finally won the prize in 1774 and went to Italy to continue his studies (Vien had been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome). There, he absorbed the influences from both classical art and the classically inspired work of earlier painters like Poussin, Caraveggio, and Hamilton, developing his own masterful style. In the great intellectual ferment of the period, thinkers like Voltaire and Hume and other enlightenment thinkers were drawn by the dream of Reason (with a capital "R") governing human life; civic virtues such as devotion to duty, simplicity, integrity, and courage were held up as antithetical to the corrupt decadence of western political life. David plunged into the ferment with disciplined enthusiasm. He began the search which informs much of his art - for the Hero, able to place duty, honor, country, above small human desires and frailties. He found many of the stories he would use as fables for the future in the history and heroes of pre-Republican Rome.

After four years in Rome, David returned to Paris and set up his own studio, teaching and taking on commissioned portraits. His technique and sense of focused composition continued to develop, although for a time he was drawn by the romantic sensibilities fashionable at the time. Already his paintings were centered on the grandeur of personal suffering. Similarly, his paintings are never merely decorative, but informed with urgent storytelling.

Belisarius,1781.

In this unusually sentimental work, Belisaurus, Justinian's greatest general, has been betrayed by political enemies and blinded by his Emperor in 561 A.D., reduced to begging in the streets of Byzantium with an innocent child. A horrified soldier recognizes his old commander while a pitying woman aids him. On the basis of this painting, David was unanimously approved for membership in the French Academy, a major step in any successful career.

Ironically, a king's commission for a painting led David to use a story told by Livy, dramatized by Corneille, which struck the art world like a thunderbolt. The Oath of the Horatii(leading picture) catalpulted the ambitious 26-year-old David from the Academy into the first place in French art and into international fame.

David had the rare gift of synthesizing intellectual trends of his own time in three dimensions, creating an almost cinematographic moment in historic time. In the Oath he drew on a legend told by Livy about early Rome - when the three brothers Horatii, to settle a war with neighboring Alba, must fight three brothers from the foe, even though the families have intermarried. Uniquely, David chose not to show the combat, but rather he created the image of the brothers swearing an oath, in spite of their sisters' tears, to conquer in spite of any personal feeling. The painting was architecturally spare, pregnant with unexpressed emotion, almost vibrating with a virile concept of sublime duty. It was a sensation in France, as if in one painting David had captured the breadth of a national desperation to seek an idealized Republic of action and nobility in the last years of a corrupt monarchy.

David followed up upon sensation by a series of paintings that embody France's descent into the maelstrom of 1789. Although he had begun his career with commissions from the king, he soon became the darling of those intellectual revolutionaries moving to power in France. Socrates was an icon for contemporary French politics in the last years of the monarchy, in which Louis XVI repeatedly fired ministers who attempted vital reforms.

The Death of Socrates, 1787.

In 1789, David's brooding painting of the first Brutus again told a story with contemporary grit; Brutus' severe self-sacrifice in ridding Rome of its tyrant king extended to murdering his own sons, who had fought for the monarchy against the Republic. Brutus sits in brooding shadow while the lictors bear home his lifeless sons and his women frantically weep. It was a dark portent of what was to come in France. The implication was clear; tyrants and their supporters must be destroyed, at whatever personal cost to the individual patriot. The ancient Romans who overthrew their kings haunted the idealogical disputes of David's day.

The Lictors Bring to Brutus
The Bodies of His Sons, 1789.

David quickly joined the revolutionary Jacobin Club following the 1789 Revolution and became a Deputy of the Convention in 1792, voting with others to behead Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. He became quickly associated with the patronage of Robespierre, the grim spirit of The Terror, and produced one of his most famous paintings following the assasination of Jean-Paul Marat, the frenzied architect of political murder.

David was now considered the foremost artist of the Revolution, but this did not save him from brief imprisonment when Robespierre, fell from power in 1794 and went to the guillotine. David spent a year in prison and was released in 1795.

The Sabine Women, 1796-99

Following his imprisonment, David withdrew slightly from contemporary subjects and returned to the motherlode of Roman and Greek history which had first brought him fame. In the last years of the 1790's, while a young Corsican named Napoleon Bonaparte was making a name for himself, he produced The Sabine Women, in which Livy's tale is underscored by both the pathos of war and the efforts at reconciliation of the Sabine women, saving their brothers, fathers, and new husbands from further war and destruction. The theme was admirably suited to the efforts of the Directory in France to bind up the wounds of the Revolution. The detail shown above (like most of David's canvases, the original is gigantic, over 12' X 17' in size) reflects David's deep vitality, use of color, and the vibrant clarity of storytelling art which he had made his own.

David caught the eye of Napoleon, and in 1798 was able to seamlessly shift to being the portraitist of his newest political hero; indeed, his portraits of Napoleon throughout the Directorate, as First Consul, and as Emperor bring the same qualities of heroic grandeur to Napoleon as David had showered on the heroes of the antique world.

Bonaparte Crossing the Alps
At the St. Bernard Pass, 1800-1801.

David appeared to have genuinely admired Napoleon and became "court painter" to Bonaparte's increasingly regal style. But with the Revolution reduced to a strong man's seizure of increasing political power, something seemed to go out of David's canvasses. His unforgettable composition reflecting Napoleon's crowning in Notre Dame cathedral is a remarkable image of an historical moment, but is so vast in physical and psychic scale that it loses the individual resonance of his earlier work. David was always at his best with individual portraits exalting individuality, not a group portrait of a king and his courtiers. Some critics view his made-to-order portraits during the Empire, while technically remarkable, as symbolic of a new syncophantism. Idealism, if ever truly present, seems to vanish from his later canvas.

David continued in the highest professional repute throughout Napoleon's reign, and managed to survive his political destruction after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He retired without hindrance, first to Switzerland, then Belgium, continuing to paint. However, David, now in his '60's, was diminishing in vitality and themes. With the fall of Bonaparte, he had lost the heroic subject of his later work; perhaps he had lost his conviction that heroes could, in fact, make a difference. His paintings continued to be technically impeccable, but the post-revolutionary world was moving in other directions. The newest mode was Romanticism, retreating from the Republican virtues of focused duty into an inward emotion. Many felt the Revolution was betrayed, and David remained the epitome of its art; like the Revolution, he was quickly becoming old.

Mars Disarmed by Venus
And The Three Graces, 1824.

The last great picture David painted, at age 75, abandoned the art of the heroic and returned to the seductions of classical mythology. The lush coloration failed to impress critics, although David was, as ever, perennially popular. The aging revolutionary's technique remained brilliantly intact; but somehow, one is left with the impression that the heroic was gone from the painter's vocabulary.

David died in 1825, the same year as, appropriately, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He was the most famous of the Neo-Classical painters and his influence transcended his time. In the Louvre, his giant heroes still burn on gilded walls.

John William Waterhouse
Sir Lawrence (Laurens) Alma-Tadema, 1839-1912

Jacques-Louis David: The Roman Revolution